Posts Tagged ‘Attempt’

Lil Wayne is back and more honest than ever on his long-awaited new album, Tha Carter V, which dropped on Friday (September 28), the day after the rapper’s 36th birthday.

After listening to 22 tracks spanning over 80 minutes, fans arrive at the album’s outro, “Let It All Work Out,” which finds Wayne opening up about the time he sustained a self-inflicted gunshot wound when he was just 12 years old. In the past, he’s claimed that the shooting was merely an accident, but his verse on Solange’s 2016 track “Mad” sparkled speculation that it was actually a suicide attempt. On that song, he rapped, “And when I attempted suicide, I didn’t die / I remember how mad I was on that day / Man, you gotta let it go before it get up in the way.”

Wayne confirms the speculation toward the end of “Let It All Work Out” — which samples Sampha’s “Indecision” — by detailing what happened during the shooting: “I aimed where my heart was pounding / I shot it, and I woke up with blood all around me / It’s mine, I didn’t die, but as I was dying / God came to my side and we talked about it / He sold me another life and he made a prophet.”

Wayne’s mother, Jacida Carter, also addressed her son’s suicide attempt on Tha Carter V‘s penultimate track, “Used 2.” In a spoken outro, she said, “I still don’t know today. Was he playing with the gun or was it an accident? I be wanting to ask him but I never asked him after all these years. … I never really found out about what really happened with him and that shooting.”

According to a recent Billboard cover story, Wayne shot himself in the chest at age 12 after his mother forbade him from rapping. In the same interview, Young Money president Mack Maine explained Wayne’s decision to finally tell the full story of what happened that day. “He just told me one day that he was ready to address it now,” Maine said. “Just being an adult, reaching a level of maturity and comfort where it’s like, ‘I want to talk about this because I know a lot of people out here might be going through that.’”